A Glimpse into Lot's Life

Our story starts at Genesis 12 – that momentous day when God asked Abraham to leave his homeland Haran, and proceed to the place where He tells him. God promised Abraham He will bless him, make him a great nation and a blessing to others. Abraham obeyed this command with alacrity, not even knowing where he was to go and proceeded with his wife and his nephew and protégé, Lot. He took with him all his moveable property which was enormous. The party  arrived in Canaan (Shechem). God promised Abraham that He would eventually give his descendants the land of Canaan to possess.

The family continued its sojourn to Negev and eventually Egypt. There he encountered a problem - his enormous wealth and extremely beautiful wife came to the notice of emperor. After some confusion and unpleasant consequences,  the family was escorted out of the country and allowed to settle in Negev – between Ai and Bethel - not far from Jerusalem, the future capital of Judea. The faithful nephew was still with him; he had also grown wealthy, probably with the wise guidance of his caring uncle. It is not known when or where he got married. We don’t know the names of his wife or two daughters.

Inevitably conflicts started cropping up between the herdsmen of the two families. Abraham decided they split and thus prevent any bitterness from creeping between the families. In his characteristic generosity, Abraham offered half of the land to Lot, whichever area he preferred. (the land was not really empty, Canaanites and Perizzites  were living there, but in the absence of any ruling monarch, the writ of two the powerful chieftains seemed to run). 

Lot was not very modest in choosing. Note the description of the piece of real estate he chose:

Gen 13:10-13  Lot looked around and noticed that the whole Jordan plain as far as Zoar was well-watered like the garden of the LORD or like the land of Egypt. (This was before the LORD destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.)   So Lot chose for himself all the Jordan plain. Then Lot travelled eastward, and they separated from each other.   So Abram lived in the land of Canaan, while Lot settled in the cities of the plain, setting up his tent in the vicinity of Sodom.   Now the men of Sodom were particularly evil and sinful in their defiance of the LORD.

Lot didn’t seem to mind that the men of Sodom were particularly evil and sinful in their defiance of the Lord. What mattered to him was the fertility of the land that he came to occupy at no cost and the opportunity to settle in a prosperous city.  Abraham moved to Hebron.

Things didn’t work quite the way Lot would have wanted. Sodom had belonged to a loose federation of five cities that were paying tribute to a powerful local prince called Kedorlaomar. Now, these cities had recently rebelled against the king and refused to pay him tribute. So  Kedorlaomar attacked Sodom (and other cities), ransacked and carried away with him the people and the spoils of the war. In the deal Lot lost everything – his hard-earned wealth, his family, personal freedom and his carefully nurtured dream of fame and riches. He himself was taken captive.

Abraham was enraged on hearing this. It is amazing that a nomadic individual like him had been commanding a personal army of over 300 trained soldiers. With their help he pursued the marauding army of Kedorlaomar, captured it and freed his nephew. Lot was brought back (along with the goods and women, the Bible says!) and installed in his beloved city of Sodom again, propped up by his loyal uncle.

We hear again after several chapters in the Bible (chapter 19). Meanwhile, Abraham is met by three “strangers” – one of them turns out to be God Himself. Abraham is given two messages, one, that he was going to be a father and two, Sodom and Gomorrah are about to be destroyed. As he faced a God whose anger burnt against Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham had one resort, one privilege – he could pray for the guilty of Sodom. This is a most remarkable instance of intercession – a tender and benevolent sympathy of Abraham on one hand and an astonishing clemency and forbearance of God on the other hand. When Abraham asserted that it doesn’t become of a righteous God to destroy the good along with the wicked, God actually agreed with him!  He let Abraham go as far as he would. In his “bargaining” it was Abraham who gave up at one point, not God. God had already decided to rescue Lot and the family from perishing along with Sodom and Gomorrah, in answer to Abraham’s prayers. 

During the following scenes, we get a glimpse of  Lot at his best and worst. He finds the two wayfarers – actually angels who had been deputed to supervise the destruction of the sin-soaked region. Lot takes them home, not recognizing their divine identities. During the night a crazed mob gathers around his home and insists he brings out the visitors so that they can “sodomize” them. Lot plays the hero’s role to perfection and refuses to let the guests be harmed. But he grandly offers that the perverts could ravish his daughters!  Although it was the custom of the day to protect guests at any cost, this terrible suggestion reveals how deeply sin has been absorbed into Lot’s life, and the lives of his family members, how much they had been hardened to evil acts in an evil city. 

The next day was the day God’s righteous anger was to reach its logical conclusion. The angels had express instructions to save Lot and his family from the terrible calamity. But neither Lot nor his family had taken the angels’ warnings seriously. They were so reluctant to leave that the angels had to take hold of the wrists of the four and drag them until they were out of danger. Apparently, Lot’s wife had not believed the warning of the two strange men who had suddenly taken over her household - and wanted to make sure. She looked back (in violation of God’s command) and was instantly punished. Probably she started to go back and was caught in the conflagration and overwhelmed by a deluge of bitumen. ‘She became a pillar of salt’ is how the Bible puts it.

By all counts, it appears that the father and the two young daughters were not overtly aggrieved by the mother’s tragic end. Lot again dared to disobey God and argued with the angels. Used to having his own ways, he refused to escape into the mountains but preferred to take shelter in a village nearby, situated in the fertile plains of Jordan. The angels condescended, agreed to his request and spared the village from the rain of sulfur that destroyed everything else in the region. 

Very soon he was fed up with life in the village, (he was afraid of the villagers the Bible says) and proceeded to the mountains the way it was originally planned. The family of three took shelter in a cave, where there was nothing to do except to eat and drink. Here, in the total secrecy their new environment provided, this ”caveman” allowed his own daughters to seduce him into sexual relations during drunken orgies (true to the spirit of Sodom) until both young women became pregnant.

Lot’s story is told in Genesis 13, 14 and 19. He is also mentioned in the New Testament in Luke 17:28 and 2Peter 2:7, 8. In the more than 30 verses where Lot is mentioned, the Old Testament doesn’t say a single good thing about him. On the contrary, the Bible consistently paints a gloomy picture of this gentleman’s character and conduct. He is portrayed as irresponsible, greedy, weak, cowardly, disobedient, shameless, alcoholic and sexually corrupt; a spoiled brat who took his uncle’s kindness for granted, he had not inherited even a fraction of the noble qualities for which Abraham was famous. There is no evidence of his doing a single good turn to Abraham by way of expressing his gratitude. Scriptures record his compromise with sin and his moral degradation, but there is no mention of his relationship with God or repentance anywhere. He was quite comfortable in the atmosphere of wickedness that prevailed in the region and he raised two daughters right in the middle of it. He allowed them to internalize the evil around them which they revealed later when an opportunity presented itself.

Archaeological pieces of evidence reveal that the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were prosperous ones and Lot must have been a rich man. When he was heroically rescued from captivity by his uncle – bundled along with women and goods! (Genesis 14:16) – he had no qualms about returning to the sin city, start right where he left off. After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, His reasons for fleeing Zoar, his first choice, a beautiful, fertile valley with plenty of opportunities (13:10) are not convincing. He could have deliberately planned it this way, so that life in a cramped cave, with two young women at his beck and call, would create opportunities for the kind of detestable activities that took place later. It was perfectly in keeping the culture of Sodom and Gomorrah. An additional inducement was the known moral weakness of the girls. (When a sex-crazed mob attacked his home the day before the conflagration, Lot had offered the wicked men the ‘services’ of his daughters as bargaining chips!)

Why didn’t the trio go back to Abraham’s home? They had this mountain of faith next doors that would have provided them a safe home, servants and property, done anything for them.  He had once gone to war with a king in order to rescue them! 

There is more about Lot in the New Testament. The last entry is surprising. St. Peter says in 2 Peter 2:7, 8:

Lot, a righteous man who was greatly distressed by the immoral conduct of lawless people—for as long as that righteous man lived among them, day after day he was being tortured in his righteous soul by what he saw and heard in their lawless actions—

That the Bible doesn’t contradict itself is a basic premise.  Given that, what am I to think about the above statement of the Bible writer? Where did the apostle get his information?  Did he know something about Lot that we don’t know? I am perplexed and confused. Can someone clarify?

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